Typical mission plan interface software for a general manned or unmanned vehicle allows operators to plan the tasks to be executed by each vehicle via a graphical user interface that includes various input and output options for feedback and control of the planning process. The graphical user interface typically provides a three-dimensional presentation that includes latitude, longitude, and altitude information in the display output relating to a proposed mission plan during pre-mission planning and also allows monitoring and control of real-time mission progress during mission execution. This includes updating way points, aborting plans, allowing manual override, and so forth. Typical graphical user interfaces to existing mission planning and control systems have limited abilities to analyze how changes to the current environment will impact tasks planned for execution in the future. This usually consists of limited abilities to visually compare the current iteration of a single plan for a single vehicle with the previous iteration of the same plan. Comparison is typically performed visually by a human operator comparing the route and each individual task within the mission plan against defined mission success criteria. Some methods attempt to provide computational metrics that quantify the performance of one or more aspects of the mission plan. These current methods are slow and manually cumbersome at evaluating the mission plan's performance for a single vehicle. Current methods are also typically tied to a single mission planner designed for a single specific vehicle further restricting their ability to evaluate alternatives for other vehicles of the same domain type or other vehicles of different domain types.
One issue with current vehicle interface software is that new plans or alternative options to existing plans are developed by mission planning systems that do not export time as an explicit parameter of the mission plan. While the notion of time is used internally by the mission planning system when planning a mission, the lack of time as a specific output parameter in the mission plan makes evaluation of timing constraints for a single plan difficult and comparison of alternative options extremely complex. This results in longer plan evaluation and approval times having negative consequences in time constrained environments.